News and Reviews

To all of us, from Sacred Dying’s Founder and Executive Director, Megory Anderson:   Dear Sacred Dying Family, Today is All Soul’s Day, the Day of the Dead, and the time of year that many cultures and communities remember those who have died during the past year. Death is the work of Sacred Dying, but as you know it is also a profoundly heart-filled giving work. We mourn all the people we have helped in their passing. And if we have lost family or a dear one to death, it hurts our heart even more. We want to remember the people we have loved, what they went through in their dying. Our turn may well be next. One of my favorite death-songs is called “Into the West” sung by Annie Lennox. It was written for the film The Lord of the Rings....

Death is in my future, but there is no future in death. We don’t want to talk about it: every audience becomes a tough one when Sacred Dying Foundation speaks. Yet the absolute and incontrovertible statistic is that 100% of those born will die. Death is as natural as birth, as ordinary as birth, as sacred as birth. But even with this absolute, our culture can barely even utter the word death. We say “end-of-life”. But End-of-Life encompasses many stages and phases. Sacred Dying Foundation has dedicated its time and resources to the final phase: the days and hours of active dying. This is the sacred part of the process that comes between palliative care for the individual and bereavement for survivors. Relatively speaking, the hours of dying are a mere blip...

At age seventeen, my mother was recruited for the war effort. WWII returning veterans needed psychiatric nurses, so the VA targeted young women who had recently graduated from high school with top honors. They wanted girls who were quick studies for their one-year intensive program, and young Delores Stroble was just what the doctors ordered. So Mom left rural Minnesota farm life to enter this program in the big city. She was smart, but she was green, and there were certain aspects of psychiatric training that were pretty frightening, as you can well imagine! But the one encounter that left the most lasting impression on her was not with one of the huge, scary, physically fit patients… it was an encounter with a comatose patient who was dying. The good news for...

WAYS TO DIE   I met someone who once told me that she wanted to die curled up in her bed at home, an old Cary Grant movie on the TV, surrounded by chocolate. It sounded nice. There are nice ways to die – the way we imagine it happening in our head when we allow for fantasies – and sometimes there are worst case fantasies. “I NEVER want to die by drowning… or by falling off a cliff… or by being eaten by a bear.” The stuff nightmares are made of. No, a Cary Grant movie seems much more comforting. So back to reality. Most of us these days die from disease and what we called a “prolonged death.” Not so forty or fifty years ago. Then we just had heart attacks or strokes and fell over dead. These days, we get cancer...

Among quotes about dying young, there is the proverb “Old men go to death; but death comes to young men”. However we choose to say it, there is no denying that each of us will die. As we discuss untimely death or any other kind of death, much of our informed conversation about grief death and dying might begin with wise quotes about death and dying from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Her  5 stages of death and dying or 5 steps of grieving  (terms used interchangeably) first outlined in her groundbreaking book, On Death and Dying (1969), have come to be known as the Kubler-Ross Model. These five stages of death and dying are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, although not necessarily in that...

There are different ways to explore and define vigil. Vigil meaning funeral vigil is perhaps the most commonly represented form. Or a candle vigil or prayer vigil to mark the anniversary of a death or tragic event such as a child gone missing. In the Roman Catholic tradition, a Sunday vigil means going to mass on a Saturday evening to fulfill the Sunday obligation. Whatever your own personal meaning of vigil is, Sacred Dying vigil programs can guide you in both traditional and non-traditional vigil prayers and give you ideas on how to use vigil candles and vigil prayer for your purposes. Get Sacred Dying’s free tips on vigiling.